


Houses in Motion; or, The Romance of the Were-House and the Dread Gazebo

by iiii



Category: Supernatural, The Tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo
Genre: Body Horror, Other, Shedding, Transformation, We have a Destiel crackfic for that, house porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-03 01:45:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10232918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iiii/pseuds/iiii
Summary: Dean is cursed to transform every full moon.  One month he meets his match.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/270863) by Richard Aronson. 



On a cold February afternoon, the evening fog rising before the setting sun, two wandering men in an old black car came to an abandoned garden by the sea.

Little remained of the fancy estate that had once been there. The main house had long since been knocked down, leaving only the concrete foundations. An octagonal gazebo with winglike gingerbread trim still stood on a knoll ten yards back from the cliff. It looked to be in good repair. The rest was fountains murky with old rainwater and planting beds overgrown with shoulder-high weeds. The driveway was the only easy access to the place.

"This'll do," Dean said.

"Told you so," Sam replied.

Dean set a propane stove on the edge of a dry cupid-trimmed bird bath to heat their supper. They sat a while on the hood of the car, watching the stars come out. Sam curled up to sleep in the back seat of the car. Dean laid himself down in a wide flat spot near the cliff.

When the moon rose, the man sleeping by the cliff became a [1979 Nomad travel trailer](https://www.google.com/search?q=1979+nomad+travel+trailer+green&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiO1f-S8ezSAhUI22MKHechB6YQ_AUIBygC&biw=1098&bih=627) with green trim.

The gazebo responded with a startled flutter of fretwork that lifted it momentarily clear of the ground.

 _Creak!_ said the trailer.

 _Groan-tictictic_ , said the gazebo.

 _Crack-grr-moan_ , replied the trailer.

In that manner they conversed for the next three days. When the moon had waned enough and set, the trailer became a man again. Dean collected his crushed bedding from the cliff's edge and settled in to sleep the rest of the night in the gazebo.

 

The sun rose. Sam took Dean running on the cliffside path he'd found while Dean was indisposed.

Dean made breakfast.

"I had a doozy of a dream," Dean started, and then thought the better of. He didn't really want to tell his little brother that he thought he'd spent the last three days in conversation with a fancy garden shed. Not that they'd said all that much, really. Buildings talk slow. "Started with midget clowns, and..."

Sam leaned back and let him storytell. They weren't due in Barstow until six.

 

They spent March at home in Kansas and April in a damp patch of Louisiana swamp. In May the waxing moon found them west of the Rockies again. Sam let Dean maneuver them into going back to the same cliffside garden.

When the moon had risen, the gazebo asked where the trailer had gone off to. The trailer talked about life on the road: travel with his brother, the places he'd been, the sights he'd seen. The gazebo spoke in return of life alone and still, watching the seasons change around him - spring blossoming, summer fog bookended by migrating butterflies, fine autumn weather and carousing teenagers.

On the third night, the trailer told the gazebo about the witch's curse that set him transforming. There had been harsh words, including the phrase 'trailer trash,' which the witch had apparently taken to heart. Dean was very lucky to have been outside the next time the full moon rose. None of their attempts to purge the curse had worked.

The gazebo said its first clear memory was the shock of being hit with an arrow. The gazebo had impulsively chased and eaten the armored idiot who'd fired it. The gazebo's first learning experience quickly followed, the lesson being that gazebos aren't meant to eat people. The gazebo had not done _that_ again.

The trailer shuddered. The reason he and his brother made such a point of looking for deserted spots to wait out the full moon, he said, was that they had found out the hard way what happened when someone was inside the trailer when he changed back into a man. It had been just some poor down-and-out looking for a place to sleep, as far as they could find out afterward. It had been... horrible.

The trailer and the gazebo sat quiet together until the moon set.

 

When Dean was done talking, Sam said, "So, tulpa?"

"That's what I'm thinking."

"What do we do?"

"Well..."

"You said it ate a guy."

"Yeah, well, so did I, once."

"You made a friend."

"Sammy..."

"Tell you what. I'll look into it, see how many people your Garden Pal's actually munched. Then we can decide. OK?"

"OK."

 

The gazebo's story checked out to Sam's satisfaction. What looked like "Castiel [tulpa sign]" painted on the gazebo's floor was really the tread-worn remains of "Castle Dansk," which led Sam to Solvang, a few miles inland and a county south from where they'd found the gazebo. A Don Quixote wannabe named Eric Sorenson had indeed gone missing there in the early seventies. Local law enforcement had dismissed witness accounts as drugged-up hippie nonsense. There was even an internet-famous story about it. But that was it, as far as weird stuff Sam could connect to the gazebo.

They went back to the garden in August, and again in November and January.

 

In March the gazebo was gone.

 

Dean sulked and fretted and refused to talk about it all the way back to Kansas. When they got home, they found the gazebo sitting in a flat space by the garage entrance, looking like it had always been there. Dean got out of the car and started yelling, harsh angry words that meant _I was so worried, don't scare me like that again_.

The gazebo stood fast under the onslaught. When Dean began to repeat himself for the second time, though, the gazebo flapped its fretwork and flew to a hillock on the far side of the pond. It settled there with its back to Dean.

"It can fly," Sam said blankly.

"Looks like," said Dean.

"You should go apologize."

"What?"

"Go say you're sorry for yelling at it before it flies away for good."

"Oh. Right."

 

After that Sam spent full moons sleeping in his own bed.

 

* * *

 

**TWO YEARS LATER**

 

"What the hell, Dean."

"Uh..."

Sam and Dean had been away for two weeks fishing a herd of kelpies out of the Neosho River. When they stopped in town on the way home for groceries, the cashier cheerily relayed the details of the theft-and-vandalism spree that started while they were gone. Someone had been coming around late at night and making off with dead trees, leaning fences, abandoned cars, and that pile of construction debris that Vita Morrisey never got around to having hauled away. What was really weird, he said, was that except for some feral roses incidental to the Bianchis' collapsed trellis, nothing that was taken was anything anyone would much miss.

Now Sam and Dean were home at the bunker, and the gazebo was sitting right next to the garage entrance. Its gingerbread wings were spread against its sides, not-quite hiding the newly-grown cedar siding enclosing its interior.

"Dean, what...?"

"How the hell should I know?"

"Dean."

"You know I can't actually talk to it for another two days, right?"

"Well, do something. Its sides are bulging."

 

"So, um, you know all the crap that's gone missing around town the past few weeks? Turns out Cas has been having cravings and ate it."

Sam raised his eyebrows.

"Remember a couple months ago, I fell asleep with Cas and got stuck?"

"Yes, Dean. I remember finding the trailer version of you crammed inside the gazebo. It was kind of a tight fit."

"Yeah, well, now Cas is pregnant."

Sam groped for a reply. What finally came out was, "So what you're telling me is the pictures I got are literally house porn."

"You took pictures? Of course you took pictures. What else would you..." Dean threw up his hands and turned away.

"Dean, wait."

Dean looked back.

"What exactly is it pregnant _with_?"

"Well, I was thinking about that. It's a tulpa, right? Runs on belief. So the babies should be tulpas, too. They'll come out whatever we believe they are."

"But Dean, you're not a tulpa. And you're the father, right? So..."

"Don't remind me."

Sam sighed.

"Anything you want from Home Depot?" Dean asked.

"Don't think so. Why?"

"Like I said, Cas's been having cravings. Wants some stuff that isn't laying around loose nearby."

 

Dean came back from Home Depot with a U-Haul full of cedar siding, sheet aluminum and steel, tempered glass, blue and white exterior paints, and copper pipe. (Had to be copper; nothing but the best for his... um.) Sam helped him stack it all between the garage and the pond.

Sam and Dean agreed to believe that the gazebo's offspring would not be shape-shifters at all, but happy, healthy, semi-animate outdoor structures with strong compunctions about harming any living creature. They each put in a few hours a day believing it as hard as they could.

The next month, at Castiel's particular request, Sam and Dean looted every electronics recycling center within two hundred miles and brought back another truckload of building supplies. The pile by the pond diminished steadily as the gazebo's sides puffed into uneven bumpy swellings.

 

On a bright clear September morning, with Sam out running the perimeter and Dean puttering in the garage, the old black car began honking her own horn.

Dean just about had a heart attack. By the time he figured out that Baby was honking in Morse code, and what she was saying, Sam was on his way back. They met by the gazebo.

One of Castiel's swollen sides had burst. A small wood-sided utility trailer was falling out. Sam and Dean each grabbed a wheel well and pulled the tiny trailer free. They had just set it down by the pile of construction materials when a terrible cracking noise announced the bursting of another baby-pod. This one held a diminutive [rowboat with a swan's head prow](https://www.google.com/search?q=swan+boats&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjfzr2rmePSAhWMnZQKHbU8CzoQ_AUIBigB&biw=1098&bih=627#tbm=isch&q=bled+swan+boats&*). In quick succession followed a little [teardrop trailer](https://www.google.com/search?q=blue+teardrop+trailer&noj=1&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwikhJ7lt4bTAhXFo5QKHUkhCHQQ_AUICSgC&biw=1098&bih=627), a confused mass of lath that Dean sorted out into a trellis arch, two undersized telephone booths (one glass-sided, the other of wood), and a set of deep drawers that Sam said was a beehive.

The last side didn't burst. Sam and Dean could hear the thing inside kicking at the siding, but it couldn't get through on its own. In the end Dean took a sledgehammer to the bulging panel. Out tumbled a bright clatter of pipe that (with a little help) popped up into a [playground dome](https://www.google.com/search?q=snipe&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjHl5_Hsu_SAhVO1GMKHUZZDHoQ_AUICCgB&biw=1098&bih=627#tbm=isch&q=playground+pipe+dome+&*).

Eight small forms now ringed the food pile, nibbling at it in ways perhaps best not thought too deeply about. Sam grabbed the stack of chamois and rags from the garage and started giving the newborns a good wipe-down.

Dean turned to the gazebo, which was slowly extending its wings to cover its broken side-panels. Dean was pawing at the broken siding, apologizing for the sledgehammer, begging Cas to tell him how to help.

Castiel creaked and moaned.

From the garage, Baby honked, _It's a gazebo. It will be fine. Take care of the little ones._  Castiel punctuated that with an emphatic _Snap!_

"Hey, Dean, you want grab the shop-vac?" Sam said.

"All right, already." Dean tenderly patted the gazebo's side and went to help Sam.

 

"Glad they all came out tulpas," Sam said. They'd found a tulpa sign marked somewhere on each of the brood.

"Yeah. They'll never hurt a soul."

"Yeah." Sam swiped the teardrop trailer's bumper clean. Its license plate said  **PAISLEY**  and had a tulpa sign painted in the background. "I feel a little cheated, though, that we don't get to name them."

"I know, right?" Dean said as he cleared the last of the sawdust out of the bottom of the swan boat. "I was kind of looking forward to that."

The swan boat, which had **Signet** written in a graceful curve of flowing script across her stern, extended a forest of swan feet from her hull, walked to the pond, and splashily launched herself.

"Remind me to pick up some marine varnish," Dean said.

Paisley rolled off to join the utility trailer - whose license plate said **PLAID** \- on a circuit of the pond.  **Fuller** , the playground dome, extended little pipe legs to chase after them. When that wasn't enough to keep up, it rearranged its segments into a truncated icosahedron and rolled like a tumbleweed.

 **Ceramiel** and **Arboriel** , the beehive and the trellis, stayed put by the food pile. All of the brood had grown visibly since they'd emerged from Castiel. The rest had gotten bigger in all dimensions, like young animals do.  Arboriel was growing like a banyan tree, slowly extending new lath into a new archway. Ceramiel was extruding another drawer on top.

"We should get them some wisteria," Sam said. "I'm going to go see what's in the fridge. Want anything?"

"You want to grab me a beer? I'm going to..." Dean waved vaguely toward the phone booths.

"Be right back."

Dean gave the wooden phone booth a last dusting. It was wooden and blue and kind of British-looking and had **AD ASTRA PER TEMPUS** inlaid in brass on its doorsill. Dean wondered if that could really mean what Dean was thinking it meant. For one thing, it was definitely a phone booth, not a police box. And, could tulpa power really be _that_ powerful?

Dean spritzed Windex on the glass booth and started polishing. This one had  **RES PEREGRE SUNT FIERI** inlaid in a circle around a tulpa sign on its floor. Sam and Dean had been bickering half the morning about what exactly that was supposed to mean. Dean would bet money that while Sam was inside getting lunch he was also making a side trip to consult Chambers.

When Dean had all the glass surfaces gleaming, he sat down to rest on Castiel's stoop. He leaned on a post, murmuring compliments and endearments he wouldn't want anyone else to hear.

Sam sat down next to Dean just in time to see the wooden phone booth whir and pulse and phase out of existence, then reappear in the middle of the game of tag being played across the pond.

"Dude," he said, handing Dean a beer.

The glass phone booth wrapped itself in lightning and sank into the ground, then dropped back into reality on the far side of the field. The trailers and the buckyball raced each other toward it.

"Strange things are afoot!" Dean proclaimed, and laughed.

"Strange things," Sam agreed. They clinked bottles and drank.

 

Dean's phone buzzed, a text from an unknown number. BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER, it said.

 


End file.
